Academic

KENNETH CHANG: Space Tourism May Mean One Giant Leap for Researchers. Science, perhaps even more?

By Glenn Reynolds

KENNETH CHANG: Space Tourism May Mean One Giant Leap for Researchers.

Science, perhaps even more than tourism, could turn out to be big business for Virgin and other companies that are aiming to provide short rides above the 62-mile altitude that marks the official entry into outer space, eventually on a daily basis.

A $200,000 ticket is prohibitively expensive except for a small slice of the wealthy, but compared with the millions of dollars that government agencies like NASA typically spend to get experiments into space, ?it?s revolutionary,? said S. Alan Stern, an associate vice president of the Southwest Research Institute?s space sciences and engineering division in Boulder, Colo. . . . Just as important as the lower cost, scientists will be able to get their experiments to space more quickly and more often, Dr. Stern said.

?We?re really at the edge of something transformational,? he added.

That’s right, and it gets better, since free-market forces are likely to lead to dynamic cost-lowering over the coming decades. This is, of course, exactly what space-tourism advocates have been talking about for a couple of decades now.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on March 01, 2011 (boomark / email).